


Something equally touching

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Artists, Bisexuality, Established Polyamorous Relationships, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Multi, Non-Graphic Violence, Polyamory, School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-10 08:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4383719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim's father reminisces about his schooldays.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: inexplicit implied references to underage sex and suicide, mentions of corporal punishment, non-graphic violence, internalised homophobia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something equally touching

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_2015) collection. 



> **Prompt:**  
>  So Tim's dad and Pomona's dad were at school together and one of them blacked the other's eye or something equally touching. Anyone fancy writing a boys' school story and telling us what really happened?
> 
> Thanks to [fengirl88](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/works) for beta-reading.

‘You can’t wear purple, Melly. You're too fair.’

Imelda Todd paused in brushing the elbow-length tresses that had obliged her to cast herself in such an unfortunately misinterpretable role in last year’s Elizabethan pageant. ‘I know, Benjy darling. But I adore the shade, and only very friendly eyes,’ she waggled the embroidery-backed brush in admonishment, ‘ever see me in it. George never complains.’ 

Ben Keith, sprawled and smoking, extended his left leg―hairy but shapely―vertically into the air and said, rotating his ankle for inter-syllabic punctuation, ‘George is the complete daltonian.’ 

‘He isn’t a bit interested in educational theory. It’s I, my dear, who must put your sister off when she starts making the case for closing the shades of the prison-house on poor Pomona. He just clamps his pipe between his teeth and starts for the french windows, grunting like a―’ 

‘I mean he’s colour-blind.’ 

‘Oh, that sort. Of course he is. It’s very restful.’ 

‘I’ll tell you how we found out at school, if you take off that horrible wrapper and come back to bed.’ 

Imelda pouted over her shoulder, then grinned as she untied the cord and let the thin silk cascade to the floor. Ben forgot his great friend’s deuteranopia for an interval, but with his next cigarette he resumed the theme. 

‘The important thing to understand about fagging in the English public schools is that it is neither a system of licensed bullying of the juniors nor one of chivalrous protection extended to them in return for crisp buttered toast―’ 

‘―I have brothers, you know,’ Imelda murmured into the bolster. ‘But I confess I never heard it called that before.’ 

‘―but,’ Ben continued, mildly reproachful, whether at the interruption or the triteness of the innuendo Imelda could not have brought herself to care less, ‘a means, moderately effective, for inuring all parties concerned to the arbitrariness and inefficiency of their lives to come. When a pre. wanted something done, he shouted “Boy!” and the fag who came last got the job. Well, with a few, it was the boy they liked least. But that was thought to offend a little against gallantry. So the activities of a dozen or more were interrupted for at least five or ten minutes while the labour pool formed, and the chore was by custom allocated to the clumsiest and slowest of the possible candidates.’ 

‘When you put it like that, it does sound like George’s Department.’ 

‘Except that George was an eccentric. He’d bark a question―source of the Spree? Does _subter_ take the accusative or the ablative? that sort of thing―at the last to pitch up and if he got it right he’d let him off and the first chap would get the fag instead.’ He leaned over to stub his cigarette in the hand-thrown, gaudily-glazed saucer on the bedside table. 

‘Oh. That does involve the poor little boy in a social calculation, doesn’t it?’ 

‘Only if he knows the answer.’ 

‘Which you always did.’ Fascinated by its dusky pink, Imelda circled his nipple with her index finger. 

‘Mm. Not always. Not when it was mental arithmetic. But _Neugersdorf_ , and _both, depending_. If George thought he’d caught you shamming ignorance to make up to the other fags he’d give you what we called “parade,” which actually meant a two-mile cross-country run before morning school. The drill used to be that one was sent with an invitation to dessert from the masters’ common room to a fellow in the village, except that during the war there weren’t enough gentlemen left and the Head got complaints from their wives about them coming home tight. So they devised a sort of hare-and-hounds to replace it.’ 

‘Wouldn’t setting the trail put them at something of an inconvenience?’ 

‘Quite so, and it would never survive the winds on the downs anyway. So they marked the route with little stakes set into the ground, about one every hundred yards. To start with, all the stakes were painted a sort of chartreuse colour and numbered. When you reported to the supervising pre. he gave you a stake painted scarlet with a number from around the middle of the trail, and you had to exchange it for the chartreuse one with the same number, or the other way about if the scarlet one was in the ground. The important thing was you returned with a stake of a different colour, but the same number as the one you started with. If you didn’t, you got a whacking.’ 

‘Sounds barmy. What if it had been grubbed up by an animal or a hiker or something?’ 

Absently, Ben twined a lock of her hair around his middle finger and shrugged. 

‘Golly,’ Imelda remarked, ‘they did harp on the _life’s unfair_ theme, didn’t they?’ 

‘Anyway, you can probably guess how the next bit goes. Two chaps in our form―Mansell mi. and Lingard, if I remember rightly―came into morning school saying that they’d got completely caught up in some sort of rag while on “parade,” forgotten to swap their stakes, resigned themselves to the inevitable beating, but when they came to report to Todd, they'd handed over the wrong colour stakes, already flinching, and he hadn’t batted an eyelid. Well, we all said Todd was touched, probably his mind was on the higher calculus or―and then there was a space for the usual ribaldries―oh, Melly, don’t look at me in that delightfully imploring way. I can’t resist you, and you can’t possibly want to know.’ 

‘You want to tell, or you wouldn’t have said it.’ 

Ben pursed his lips and looked sideways at her, conceding the point by not conceding it. She snuggled closer and threw her left leg over his right. 

‘George was soppy even by a bar set rather high―are you surprised?’ 

‘At the bar. Not George.’ 

‘You shouldn’t be, if you consider it for a moment. Relief can be achieved in solitude at minimal risk of discovery. Only one of the housemasters retained the Victorian attitude, and luckily enough, his name was Bates, which made it impossible to take him seriously even if you did have the great misfortune to end up on the business end of one of his hygienic homilies. No―except for the obvious and trivial detail, affairs were governed by the same impulses as obtain in the wider world―the social and the sentimental, with the sexual running those a very distant third.’ 

Imelda cocked a perfectly plucked brow, which he either did not see or chose to ignore. It was true of their own practical and mostly happy quadrilateral too, she reflected, but she was slightly surprised that Ben, the most voracious of them, should say so. For herself, George and Rosa, it did not, she supposed, need saying. 

‘After games, who “had a case” with whom was the principal topic of polite conversation, and it fulfilled a need for affection in very impersonal surroundings―more the need of the older boy to extend than the younger to receive it, actually. Particularly true of George, as you might guess.’ 

‘You must have been very fond of him even then.’ 

‘Fond?’ Ben ran his free hand through his hair, leaving it stuck up in a sort of lapwing crest. ‘At an Academy for Young Ladies one might be fond, maybe. Todd was a swell, and a School swell at that, not just a House one―for all he was universally considered a bit rum. You might as well say a villein was fond of the lord of the manor, or of his lord’s baron.’ 

‘All the same.’ 

‘Yes. Anyway, do you want to hear the rest of this story or not?’ Imelda, sensing the question to be rhetorical, pressed her lips to his jaw, roughened and shadowed as it always was by mid-afternoon. 

‘You should wear a beard.’ 

‘Tried it once. Women said how frightfully artistic I looked. Where was I? Oh, yes. But Lingard said it couldn’t have been absent-mindedness, he noted it most carefully in the ledger of punishments. So I said―and I don’t know what possessed me, except I suppose it was in the papers at the time, perhaps old Todd’s kicked over the traces and turned Bolshevik. We all laughed, and it became our running joke until the next thing came along. But it must have caught the collective imagination, because a couple of days later an excitable little scug informed us solemnly that the whole House was a nest of Reds. Well, we absolutely howled, and of course I had to draw it: I requisitioned a new jotter for the purpose, fancying myself a sort of juvenile and twentieth-century Hogarth. I drew a new instalment each evening: George arresting the Head and addressing his wife and daughters in the worst terms of abuse I knew, signing a peace treaty with Kaiser Bates, organising the school into War Soviets―it was a roaring success, and Mansell mi. came up with the idea of cashing in: halfpenny for a view, sixpence or ninepence if you wanted to be immortalised as a caricature, depending on prominence. 

‘Meanwhile, some little blighter had chanced his arm when George gave him “parade” and not gone at all, just dawdled off into the bushes for a smoke and handed back the same stake half an hour later, slightly breathless and bold as you like. And George had done just as before, so someone else tried it and got away with it, and it wasn’t long before it reached the ears of the other prefects. Mad as it sounds, by the standards of a public school in those days George’s Asquithian Liberalism―he hasn’t changed a jot, the old darling― _was_ tantamount to Socialism, so some of the denser characters took it seriously. Davies, the Head of House, was a tremendous slab of true-blue beef who had finally been hoisted into the Sixth after five and a half years of parcelling out his work among the serf class in an appropriately feudal manner. He approached George in a fairly foolish way, blustering about privilege and duty, and of course George hadn’t a notion what he meant, except that he was being accused of encouraging “side” among the fags, a very base crime, so he shrugged him off rather brutally. Whereupon it all got quite heated and Davies stripped him of his priv. to fag for a fortnight.’ 

Imelda’s eyes grew wide, her usual look of indolent amusement evaporated, and she became for a moment the child for whom brushing and polishing her brothers’ OTC kit was not loathed drudgery but high honour. 

‘Well, you must have quarrelled with George―you know at the climactic point he says _hm, very likely_ and ambles off―’ 

‘Utterly disconcerting. The first time, we were staying with Anna at Brimpton and I found he’d taken his shotgun. When I was about Pomona's age, a neighbour had crawled through a gap in a hedge with his, loaded―made quite an impression; till then I didn’t know people really did, only in books and for love. So I went shrieking across the fields like a Maenad in a tea-gown. Of course he only meant to work it off on the rabbits, and he was revoltingly solicitous and apologetic. Awfully shy-making.’ 

Ben kissed the top of her head. ‘Oh my dear―and, anyway, where almost any other pre. might have gone to the housemaster for redress―for disputes between prefects didn’t at all come under the rubric of sneaking―George strolled off to the nets and coached whichever duffers were there until supper. Davies panicked, aware he’d been rash, and called a meeting to ratify the sentence retrospectively. That had the prefects pretty fed up, because although the majority were prepared to back him in the interests of law and order, they still thought he’d been a b.f., and a minority weren’t prepared to back him at all. One of those who wasn’t was Mansell ma., who got hold of his kid brother and cuffed all he knew out of him. So it spread through the lower school, which took sides in the haphazard way of small boys, more for the fun of partisanship than out of any sense of conviction. And George, head cleared by exercise, and meaning to try and make sense of things with Davies, walked back into a House stewing for a feud of Icelandic proportions. 

‘When he came into Hall a crowd of fifth-form nobodies lifted their eyes and tittered. The fags all nudged each other gleefully, and one of the Fifths called out, “Not gone to earth, Todd?” to which someone else replied, “Why, Curtis, are you looking for something to shoot?” because we’d decided that Curtis's people were obviously awful, and maybe they were. George looked around slowly, and said, “I’m sure you’ve heard I’m accused of some―unsporting conduct. Good of you men to keep me company.” It took them a moment to realise they’d both been smacked, and for the rest of us to work out if we approved, which I think on the whole we didn’t, it savoured of school-story, and into the silence came a harrassed and redfaced Mansell ma., who'd clearly been trying to intercept George before he got into Hall, and asked him to toasted cheese in his study. 

‘There were a few minor scraps and skirmishes that evening. The pro-Todd faction among the fags debated whether we should offer our services regardless, but the motion was rejected as indicating “side” as well as being likely to get us whopped. I had to retire to a fairly anti-Todd bedroom, which made me pretty sick and giddy. If it’d been one with fold-up beds I’d have been certain to have been lamp-posted―shut up in it, I mean; it was the closest thing on earth to being buried alive, and upside-down into the bargain.' He shuddered. Imelda remembered his disinclination to observe the priest-hole at a recent house-party. 'But luckily enough it wasn’t―still, it was moderately torrid. They said some things I shan’t bore you with―’ 

Imelda smiled, but saw that the pudeur of the boy had overwhelmed the progressive opinions of the man: he stared straight through her into the past even as his fingers twined with hers. 

‘―and I went to bed feeling as if I’d been bastinadoed, but satisfied that I’d defended my honour and Todd’s as well as could be expected. But I couldn’t sleep. I heard them all drop off, and I lay awake longer than I ever had in my life―one o’clock, two―I couldn’t put their taunts out of my mind. It was unimaginative as only real filth can be, and I’d heard it all before, but this time some of it had landed square in a way none of the blows really had.’ 

He came to and felt for his cigarette case; flipping it open, he took two and lit both, handing one to Imelda. She wriggled apart from him, reached over and put the ashtray between them on the bed. The story had become intimate and important in a way neither of them had foreseen or wished, but there was no way of stopping now. 

‘Bit hard to believe, looking at me now, but I was rather run after―’ 

It wasn’t in the slightest, Imelda thought, considering his fine calves and thighs, the deep incurve at the base of his back, belly and torso all the easier to imagine youthfully plump because they were now beginning to round into middle-age, his broad, soft lips and narrow, mischievous, green-flecked eyes. She almost said so, but uncharacteristically checked herself. 

‘―and frankly, I was the most horrible little tease. But it had never even occurred to me to deny George anything he asked. In fact, I wanted―but that wasn’t done, the younger _wanting_ to do things―’ 

He laughed shrilly, and Imelda suddenly felt the lack of her dressing-gown.

‘―it was a strictly pederastic system in that way. But at that uncharted hour I was obliged to admit it to myself: it wasn’t a chore, or a bore, nor even a bit of fun; it certainly wasn’t wholesomely boyish hero-worship―it was, well―’ he seemed to recall to whom he spoke, and swallowed, ‘―desire, an active desire. And I thought it must mean that I was a degenerate beast, and I should be my whole life, and I lay there in a muck sweat, roiling it around in my mind until I fell into the uneasiest of dreams. I woke again long before the rising-bell. There was no school rule against getting up early; as far as the beaks were concerned it was late you mustn’t be. But in our bedroom it was “side” to stir before seven. I didn’t care. My night’s meditations had put me outwith the law.’ 

He stubbed out his cigarette; Imelda did the same, though hers was only two-thirds smoked. It gave her an excuse, in replacing the ashtray, casually to retrieve her kimono. She pulled it around her shoulders and curled up against the footboard, resting her chin on her knees. 

‘It was about half-past five, I suppose, light enough to see. I put on my dressing-gown and went down to the Schoolroom, which had nothing to do with school, but was a sort of common room for the boys too young to have studies. It must’ve once, though, because it had a blackboard running the length of one wall, chipped and cracked and covered with the usual graffiti. I cleaned it and started to draw, reproducing from memory the cartoons I’d done in the jotter, adding one of Davies at the head of a counter-revolutionary charge. My mind was blank of everything but shape and line―I had two colours, red and white. I worked fast, and with a fluency I’ve only managed once or twice since, as if the chalk were an extension of my hand, or I were spilling into it―ugh, it’ll be _inspiration_ next. But it wasn’t, it was absolutely bodily and material, like―climbing, if you’ve ever―’ 

‘I know.’ 

‘Yes, I'm sorry, of course you do. Your _Waking Kore_ marks a development, did I say? Though I'm not sure about that title for it. I finished some time after six, went back up to bed and slept through the rising-bell at quarter to seven and the chapel bell at ten past. I was as stiff as a board, sodden and dazed with sleeplessness, bruised and aching from the thrashing I’d got the night before, though I hadn’t felt it at all when I’d got up earlier. I cut chapel and crawled down to the Schoolroom to inspect my handiwork. Melly, it was―I don’t exaggerate when I say it was the best thing I’d done, or would do until I was in my twenties, and it was―horrendous. Every ambivalent thought I’d had that night had gone into it; George was huge and heroic and grotesque and dissolute at once―the style was crisp and clean, but there was a dreadful cynicism, a disillusionment about it, too. I can see every inch of it still. I knew I should clean it off, but I couldn’t bear to. I sloped into breakfast and ate, as I remember, rather heartily and indiscriminately. 

‘When we went into the Schoolroom to gather our things for the morning and the rest of the fellows saw it―well, God knows, I’ve always held in pity and contempt those fatheads whose best days were already behind them when they unbuckled their pads after the Old Boys’ match―but there is _something_ about boys’ admiration that is quite unlike anything, however gratifying, that one might experience in adult life: total, you know, and guileless. And it was universal: the pro-Todd lot saw the monumentalism, and the anti- the monstrosity, and anyway, they relished the libels upon the masters and other prefects. Then we heard voices in the passage, and someone ducked his head out to report the approach of Davies, Todd and Mansell ma., coming to read the House notices, one of which would be the reinstatement of Todd’s privs, tucked in face-savingly between an admonishment about the deplorable state of the bathroom and the team for that Saturday’s House match or something. Mansell ma. had worked out that what the rest of us see as red and green George sees as slightly different shades of mud, and mediated over Welsh rarebit and Eccles cakes. Lingard shoved a board-rubber into my hand and said, “quick, you ass, wipe it off,” but I think I just stared at him dumbly. Anyway, there wasn’t time. 

‘Off the footer pitch, Davies paid very little attention to his surroundings, and he couldn’t, for a moment, understand why his furious glare hadn’t produced immediate silence. He turned around very slowly to find himself nose-to-nose with his portrait as a fat, sweating Cossack, and of course everyone fell about some more, because he was making exactly the grimace I’d drawn. I was watching George, of course. His face was expressionless but he looked like he was being held up by strings. I should have felt a heel, I suppose, but it didn't occur to me that an Olympian like George could be wounded by anything _I'd_ done. Davies shouted at us to shut up, and we did, more or less. “Who did this?” he roared. He knew, of course, so he didn’t wait for me to answer. Everything felt unreal and misty: my scalp went cold and my ears rang. He called me into the middle of the room and asked the usual sort of rhetorical questions, then told me to wipe the board clean. I was still clutching the rubber. I don’t actually remember this bit, but afterwards George said I looked most unlovely, furtive and mulish, I think were his words, and I said, “No.” Davies bellowed and grabbed me by the arm―he was barely taller than me but twice my weight and then some, and he swept me off my feet. George, I think, was worried he’d do me a real injury―broken bones did tend to get the beaks involved―and as he stepped forward to intervene the board-rubber flew out of my hand and hit him a glancing blow just there―’ Ben indicated a point high on his cheekbone, ‘the sort that only stings for about five minutes but fills up into a glorious comic-strip shiner the next day. Which it did. Davies let me go and I collapsed into a heap and vomited porridge and smoked haddock all over George's boots.’ 

Imelda, both hands clamped over her mouth, rocked with mirth. ‘I shouldn’t. Did you get walloped black and blue?’ 

‘Not, actually. That sleepless night and greedy breakfast did me a good turn: I was carted off to the sicker for a day and a night and by the time I was back in school no-one wanted to―’ 

‘Bring it up?’ 

‘Well, that was the idiom I was trying to avoid, yes. Well, not officially. I had to endure the repartee of my contemporaries for the rest of the half, of course, and even the summer vac. didn't quite serve to suppress their hilarity.' His small, contained smile told Imelda all she needed or could bear to know. 

'George never alluded to it: he just treated me like any other fag, which must have taken a degree of self-control I was wholly unable to appreciate at the time―it really was the most superbly iridescent black eye―and he left that summer anyway. While I was laid up someone took the jotter out of my desk and―destroyed it, I suppose. No-one ever saw it again. I never found out who did that.’ 

‘But you said that George―’ 

‘It wasn’t until we ran into each other again some years later: he was reading for the Bar and I was mooching about Chelsea picturesquely starving.’ 

‘There is something inordinately sweet about the thought of men using retrospection like that to―to embed themselves in each other’s emotional lives.’ 

‘We don’t, not any more.’ 

‘I know, dear. He does talk to me, very occasionally. How did he feel about it? The caricatures, I mean.’ 

‘Quite deeply hurt, I think, though he made light of it. But curiously flattered―he saw what it meant, you see.’ 

‘Yes, he’s rather clever like that. One doesn't expect him to be. Pomona’s inherited it.’ 

Ben looked faintly startled; his goddaughter’s lumpen attempts at fey charm repelled him, and he had seen in her little evidence of the social intelligence that his own child directed towards resolutely wicked ends. It was probably as well that the girls cordially disliked one another: there was something obscurely incestuous in the thought of the parents' friendships being replicated in the next generation. Once Tim went to Kingscote in the autumn, they would probably develop their own circles, rarely meeting even in the holidays. If Pomona were ever to go to school Melly would insist on some appalling dodgers’ establishment where the kids whitewashed the outbuildings and performed circus tricks on ponies instead of acquiring the multiplication tables. 

Below the window, shadows lengthened across the chamomile lawn, which, warmed by a long day of sun, sent up its delicious apple scent. The quality of the light had shifted definitively from drowsy, sensuous and late-afternoonish towards vespertine chastity. Ben lifted his wristwatch from the bedside table. 

‘Good Lord―the others will be back in twenty minutes. Does this wretched party oblige us to dress? It’s blasted hot for it.’ 

Imelda gave him an appraising look. ‘Yes,’ she said, with an air of decision that the matter of lounge-suit-or-dinner-jacket scarcely seemed to warrant. ‘I’m afraid so.’ 

She stretched, gathering her hair with both hands into a dark bundle at her nape, then shaking it out again, the deep auburn tumbling over the purple silk to which it was so ill-matched and the pale bosom it perfectly complemented. Ben felt―he could not say why, but just like the man in the poem― _chilly and grown old_.

**Author's Note:**

> The public school that Mr Keith and Mr Todd attended is a composite of many literary representations of such institutions. 
> 
> This is set on the _Autumn Term_ timeline, the summer before the opening of that novel; Mr Keith's story takes place in the early 1920s.
> 
> The poem quoted in the last line is Robert Browning's 'A Toccata of Galuppi's.'


End file.
